Create a Transparent Background in Photoshop

Whether you’re working on a logo, isolating a product, or just thinking your project would look better without its background, at some point, you will need to know how to make a transparent background in Photoshop. Thankfully, the newest, 2020 version of Photoshop makes that job incredibly easy – most of the time. Here’s how to make sure you know all the ins and outs of selecting objects and deleting backgrounds. 

When You’re Starting From Scratch

If you’re beginning a new project in Photoshop, you’ll start by staring at a big, blank, white page, and that page, unfortunately, is locked. Your first inclination might be to try and unlock the layer and throw it away, which seems easy enough, but if you do that, Photoshop will throw up an error message across your screen. So here’s how to get around this locked, white background and turn your bottom layer transparent:

1. First, create a new layer. The problem with simply throwing away the original locked background layer is that it means you have no artboard to look at. Photoshop doesn’t like this idea. The easy remedy? Simply create a new layer with nothing on it. 

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